Chapter 33 Fifteen Years Ago
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Fifteen Years Ago
Lorissa Rezaran was dead in the atrium of the Bank of Almere, and the boy from the woods was filled with ice. The fallowwolf wailed his grief at the sky.
Water lay everywhere, shining pale green beneath the moonlight filtering through the emerald dome.
A vast pillar of glassy liquid stood proud, unnatural, at the behest of the Wielder the boy had compelled to stop drowning his mother.
A lambent white-gold emanated from hundreds of small banker’s lamps.
The air was scented with smoke and ash and honey.
For several long beats, there was an arcane stillness, a pause in reality.
Then it fractured like a bone.
“Mama,” the boy whispered, voice splintering, sobs springing afresh.
“Samien,” moaned Vielle, the mage who’d killed the boy’s mother, as she crawled on hands and knees to the dead body of a handsome mage in a violet cloak. His eyes stared at the domed ceiling, unseeing.
The boy ran for his mother, half-blind with tears, snot running into his mouth. He fell to his knees beside her.
Two sentinels approached the spot where Lorissa Rezaran was cooling into marble, but Rasso’s howling dropped into a low, feral growl.
“Stop,” the boy commanded, with a surge of desperate emotion.
They all stopped. The mages, the fallowwolf, curtailed with unnatural suddenness.
The boy was holding four mages still at once—while cuffed in deminite, no less—but was too distraught to consider the magnitude of this.
“Live,” he compelled his mother, with every last shred of magic in his still-developing well.
She did not live.
“Please. Live. I command it.”
She did not live.
“Mama. Please, Mama. Live.”
She did not live.
A sob turned into a hiccup, and he shook his head frantically, furiously. “No. No, no, no. No. This isn’t real. No.”
“Fant,” one of the sentinels said, his voice so soft it almost broke the boy. “Fant. Cera briet.”
The boy did not speak Bellandrian, but intuited that the mage was trying to tell him either that it was alright or that it was over. But it wasn’t either of those things. How could it be? The woman who’d saved him was dead at his hand. How could he live alongside this truth?
Unless…
He’d heard some of the adults at the encampment discuss a hallowed scroll of necromancers—their last resort.
A list of mages who could bring the dead back from beyond the veil.
They hadn’t sought out said necromancers for the fallen recruits two days ago, because there hadn’t been enough left of their bodies to revive. But Lorissa was still whole.
If the boy could just get her back to the Havenwood…
“Help me,” he commanded the remaining wardholders, both with words and with his very soul. “Help me get her body to the portari gate. Unseen. Unheard. Help me.”
So they helped him.
As the unnatural pillar of water crashed to the flagstones, the wardholders propped Lorissa Rezaran up on their shoulders and dragged her all the way to Almere’s central-west portari gate, as though hauling a drunken friend home from the tavern.
Rasso continued to growl and whine, but did not attack.
The boy followed them, dragging his scuffed boots along rain-slicked cobbles, the canyon inside him filling with an ache that would never, from this night on, abate.
And in the atrium of the flooded bank, a small gold wand box drifted aimlessly on a shining green stream.
Lyrian was waiting by the Havenwood portari gate—leaning against a narrow wyrmwood and nervously carving a wooden board game piece with a paring knife—when the boy, the fallowwolf, and his dead wife arrived home.
At the sight of his murdered beloved, Lyrian let out a strangled sound.
The board game piece fell to the moonlit ground.
“It was my fault.” The boy fell to his knees, dropped his head into his hands. Warm tears poured through the cracks between his fingers like blood from a mortal wound. “It was all my fault.”
“No,” Lyrian moaned, pleaded. “No, Riss—I told you, I told you. Why didn’t you listen?”
“Dad, listen, it wasn’t her fault. I followed her invisibly, and the tincture wore off, and it distracted her, and—she got hit. Because of me.”
The boy didn’t know why he let the truth gush from him like water from a burst dam.
Perhaps because the guilt and shame were pressing on his chest with all the force of a ten-ton rock, and if he didn’t squirm out from under it, he might die himself.
Perhaps because he just wanted, needed, for someone who loved him to tell him it was all alright, that it was not his fault, that he didn’t mean for this to happen.
How could he have known? How could he have stopped it?
By thinking faster, the boy realized miserably. If you’d compelled Vielle quickly enough, she never would have…
“But it’s going to be alright, isn’t it?” he begged, throat bobbing, eyes filled with salt. “You have the scroll of necromancers. They can bring her—”
Yet Lyrian was already striding away, back toward the camp, as though he could not bear to look at his dead wife or his life-ruining son for a moment longer. The fallowwolf sat vigil beside the corpse of his lost mistress, crying in a way that broke the boy’s already ruined heart.
For several minutes, the breathless boy lay flat on his back on the forest floor, concentrating on the twigs and roots jutting into his spine, pressing his eyes tightly shut and willing himself to wake from this nightmare.
When the distant crunch of overlapping footsteps grew louder, the boy peeled his eyes open.
Several feet away, the dropped board game piece was nestled at the foot of a tree.
The boy scrambled to get it, muddying the knees of his pajamas.
He tucked it in his pocket without knowing why.
Perhaps some part of him knew what was coming before it did.
Two figures emerged from the deep black shadows: his father and his brother.
No Healers. Nobody carrying a scroll of names.
Just the only two people left in the world who loved him.
His brother wore a pale, horrified expression that only deepened at the sight of his deceased mother. He shook his head so fast it must have made him dizzy—that universal reaction, that feeling of no, no, no, this cannot be. A violent rejection of this new reality.
His father carried an object that sent a sharp slice of cold down the boy’s spine.
A set of deminite shackles.
Larger than the ones removed from him as a baby. Newer, as though they’d been made especially for him. As though his adoptive parents had always known, on some level, that this moment would come.
“It wasn’t my compelling,” the boy whispered. “I promise, it wasn’t. I only used it to try and help her. I…”
His unlistening father crouched before his no-longer son, movements stiff and harsh, and latched the boy in. The deminite was cold and heavy around his ankles, endlessly more robust than the slender bracelet, and impossible to compel through.
Not that the boy would even try.
Not now. Never again.
Lyrian dragged the boy into the portari gate, through one of the four ascenite arches, beneath the carved axelmares on hind legs with their spectral wings unfurled, and onto the black-tiled threshold where raw magic whorled and swirled.
“Dad? What are you doing?” the boy pleaded, though, of course, he already knew.
“We took you in,” Lyrian said, his voice terrifying in its emptiness. “She didn’t want you, you know. I was the one who insisted we keep you. Protect you. Raise you. And now she is dead because of you.”
The boy’s brother sniffed sharply, as though holding back tears.
“I’m sorry,” the boy from the woods pleaded. “I’m so sorry, Levan.”
But Levan simply stared at him, as though remembering the way he’d been forced to climb the wyrmwood all the way to the top, as though remembering all the board games he’d lost to his indomitable brother, as though remembering every night he’d gone to bed hungry from sharing their meager food rations with one extra mouth.
Then Levan looked at his dead mother, and his entire face collapsed with grief, eyes screwed up, mouth twisted, the sound of his sobs enough to carve permanent grooves into a heart.
It was the last thing the boy from the woods saw as Lyrian raised his wand and uttered a destination. “Ad Novarin north-east.”
The gate obliged before the boy could say goodbye.
The Havenwood swirled and evaporated, and a new city stood beyond the ascenite arches and bucking axelmares.
Beneath a star-sprinkled sky stood tall townhouses of pale creamstone, sapphire spires and crimson obelisks, purple-domed Augurest temples and vendor carts selling cups of whisky hot chocolate.
The street hung with the scents of honeywine and old parchment, and each cobblestone was etched with the title and author of a book.
Hoof clops and raucous laughter rang out like music.
A babble of scholars in pale blue cloaks stood outside a towering library, passing around a smoking pipe and arguing vehemently about something so abstract as to be nonsense.
For the second time in his life, the boy was left alone in the world.
That first night wandering the streets of Novarin was the longest of his life.
The deminite shackles around his ankles were linked together with a chain, and while they did not prevent him from walking, they were cold, heavy, clanking with every step.
They filled him with a deep, animal shame, and he could not meet the gaze of anyone who searched his tearstained face.
He was deeply aware of the dirt on his pale blue pajamas, of how it must make him look like a beggar.
He wrapped his too-big black cloak tighter around himself and kept walking, nowhere to go except away.
Novarin was a scholar’s city, and he felt the hot press of academic stares as he wandered. He was a curiosity, a research subject.
Why was this young child wandering the streets alone?
Why did he wear such thick manacles?